Anonymous takes aim over Europe’s SOPA – Hackers are attacking sites and looking to expose information on European officials in response to the signing of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. ACTA critics say it’s even worse than the Stop Online Piracy Act floated in the U.S.

Windows Phone 7 App Fights Malaria – Microsoft has awarded an Imagine Cup Grant to a team that developed a custom Windows Phone 7 and application that can diagnose malaria then upload the data to cloud servers that map the data to help track outbreaks.

Make a Kindle Fire safe for kids – The Internet is a place where innocence goes to die. As the father of a 4-year-old, I run our house like digital-era Holden Caulfield, disabling or password-protecting the browser on every gadget I can own.

How to Hack an iPad – Most iPad and iPhone owners rely on their Apple ID password to prevent access to their account details. This won’t stop a hacker gaining access to your personal account and log in details.

Should I Use the 32- or 64-bit Version of Internet Explorer? – The 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Vista come with both 32- and 64-bit variations of Internet Explorer. But the operating systems default to using the 32-bit brower. They do this for a good reason: backward compatibility. Plug-ins have to be rewritten to work with the x64 version, and a lot of plugins have yet to be rewritten.

Company News:

Warner Bros. Says ‘No’ To Early Netflix Queuing – Starting February 1, Netflix users won’t be able to add new Warner Bros. movies to their rental queues until 28 days after the film’s DVD debut, according to online reports. The new restriction is reportedly part of the deal announced in early January that delays new Warner Bros. films from coming to Netflix until 56 days after the film’s initial release on DVD and Blu-ray.

Jon Rubinstein Leaves HP and webOS Behind – Former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has officially left HP, effective today. Rubinstein became CEO of Palm in 2009 and led the company’s push with webOS, eventually selling the company to HP in 2010. When asked if he had any immediate plans, Rubinstein said he was going to take a well-deserved rest after working on webOS for the last few years. And what a last few years they have been.

McAfee, Symantec Squabble Over Market Share Numbers – The hardest part about watching a nerd fight is knowing which side to root for. Such is the position we find ourselves in as two security giants squabble over claims the other is making. What started the whole thing was Symantec telling Reuters in an interview earlier this week that it was snatching up antivirus market share from competitor McAfee.

Off Topic (Sort of):

Cracked: 6 Painful Things Nobody Tells You About Fighting – They’ll throw haymakers and roundhouse kicks with images of Jean-Claude Van Damme spin-punching a guy through a plate glass window dancing in their heads. Thirty seconds later, they’re laying on the floor, gasping and hissing in pain while rubbing some body part, perhaps while crying. Because in the real world, it turns out …

Google Privacy Policy Claims Challenged By Watchdog – Google’s privacy policy changes have caught the attention of an independent watchdog of the federal cloud that is worried about security risks for government workers. SafeGov disputes the Internet search leader’s claims that the changes won’t affect government workers using Google apps.

Cellphone use in cars must be viewed as anti-social – Scan traffic anywhere and you’ll catch them. Drivers with their phones held furtively to their ear or with their heads down tapping away while waiting at a red light. More terrifying is catching them speeding by you on a 100 km/h highway. Or maybe you aren’t just catching them — maybe you are them.

Today’s Quote:

“What you cannot enforce, do not command.”

– Sophocles

Today’s Free Downloads:

TheSage 4.0.1784 – TheSage English Dictionary and Thesaurus is a complete dictionary and a multifaceted thesaurus for the English language. TheSage English Dictionary and Thesaurus runs locally, and does not use your Internet connection.

GameSave Manager 2.3 – With GameSave Manager, you can easily backup, restore and transfer your gamesave(s). No longer do you need to manually track through all of the those different directories to backup/restore/transfer your gamesaves.

4 responses to “Tech Thoughts Daily Net News – January 29, 2012”

Here’s the documentation for TheSage & it looks very interesting. It’s a project run out of Princeton by linguists for linguists & therefore it’s not prescriptive, meaning it will find & display “gray” or “grey” so it’s no use as a spell checker. I’ve tried the online version & it looks like it will be a very good tool for writers, word puzzlers & lovers of words. In the link above there’s a pic of the GUI & it looks a trifle ‘busy’, but a very, very nice freebie IMO

Thank you for that Bill, I’m going to give it a run & pin to the taskbar if it’s up to snuff [practising my words there]

For some reason the 64bit version loads by default on my laptop. I therefore used it infrequently because RoboForm, my password manager of choice, did not support 64bit browsers. I recently decided to use IE9 for something and was delighted when a message came up saying that the RoboForm toolbar was ready to use. This may seem like a small thing but having a choice of browser is very important to me. Now just waiting to be able to use Chrome with RoboForm.